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The "very fine people" massed in Charlottesville, 2017 |
Rereading the book after four decades, I'm flabbergasted at its immediacy―and no longer optimistic about our nation's ability to escape fascism.
Trump has brainwashed their already-unhinged minds―you merely have to listen to what the 60 percent are telling us, to know―and there's no "curing" them now. They're like the silent super-spreaders of Covid-19, only the disease they're carrying is Trumpism.
Trump's madness will sink its teeth into our unconscious―like Covid-19 sinks its hooks into our lungs―and his authoritarian and tyrannical ideology will overpower us.
We're on the slow march to American fascism.
"Everywhere in the West," Jung writes, "there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population.
"One should not, however, overestimate the thickness of this stratum.
"It varies from country to country in accordance with national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature. Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could on an optimistic estimate put its upper limit at about 40 percent of the electorate.
"A rather more pessimistic view would not be unjustified either, since the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of man’s outstanding peculiarities, and even where it exists it proves to be wavering and inconstant, the more so, as a rule, the bigger the political groups are. The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional state should succumb to a fit of weakness.
"Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic.
"In this state all those elements whose existence is merely tolerated as asocial under the rule of reason come to the top. Such individuals are by no means rare curiosities to be met with only in prisons and lunatic asylums. For every manifest case of insanity there are, in my estimation, at least ten latent cases who seldom get to the point of breaking out openly but whose views and behavior, for all their appearance of normality, are influenced by unconsciously morbid and perverse factors. There are, of course, no medical statistics on the frequency of latent psychoses―for understandable reasons. But even if their number should amount to less than ten times that of the manifest psychoses and of manifest criminality, the relatively small percentage of the population figures they represent is more than compensated for by the peculiar dangerousness of these people.
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Trump campaign ad |
"Their mental state is that of a collectively excited group ruled by affective judgments and wish-fantasies. In a state of 'collective possession' they are the adapted ones and consequently they feel quite at home in it. They know from their own experience the language of these conditions and they know how to handle them. Their chimerical ideas, upborne by fanatical resentment, appeal to the collective irrationality and find fruitful soil there, for they express all those motives and resentments which lurk in more normal people under the cloak of reason and insight.
"They are, therefore, despite their small number in comparison with the population as a whole, dangerous as sources of infection precisely because the so-called normal person possesses only a limited degree of self-knowledge."
Unless the 40 percent of us who harbor no grievances, no "fanatical" resentments, come to grips with our unconscious―"the undiscovered self"―there is no resisting Trump or his mass movement.
